Farmhouse Style Kitchen: Makeover Reveal

Nov 2017

Sarah is a wife and mother of 3 living in a 1980’s fixer-upper. She started her blog, Little Vintage Nest, in December 2015 to share her budget-friendly DIY projects and the journey of renovating their home. Recently, they redesigned their kitchen with the Bradstreet fireclay farmhouse sink from Sinkology. Check out her recap of the experience and reveal of the redesigned kitchen here.

It’s the happiest day of all because today I finally get to share our completed kitchen makeover. Eek!!!! You guys, I can’t even believe this day has arrived. I’m feeling so many different emotions as I sit down to right this post, but mostly I’m just so excited and grateful to have this project complete. And if I’m being honest, I never really thought this day would come. I mean, even though I hated our kitchen with the awful tile countertops and multi-colored backsplash, I never imagined that we’d actually go through the process of updating it. But little by little we made it happen and I’m so darn excited to share it with you all today. We have new quartz countertops, new backlash, and a farmhouse sink. Our little kitchen doesn’t even look like the same place anymore! I have a gazillion photos to share, so grab a snack and let’s get into it. First here is a little reminder of what the kitchen looked like before:

And here it is now:

Can you even believe this is the same kitchen?! Every time I walk in here I am in disbelief that this is my kitchen. The transformation is pretty remarkable. I mentioned a few times that we were unsure on what to do with our countertops. I was strongly leaning towards butcherblock, but ultimately I decided that quartz would be a better option for us. It’s just so durable and low maintenance. Plus I wanted it to be white in order to open this space up and make our small kitchen feel bigger. It’s exactly what I envisioned and I’m soooooooo thrilled with how it all came together.

If you’ve been following along with our renovation progress you probably saw my post about installing our farmhouse sink. (You can check it out here if you missed it.) The faucet and sink is from Sinkology and it was actually pretty simple to install, but the tricky part was making the cabinets around the sink work. My husband was a genius and figured out a way to take apart the lower cabinets and cut them down so we could still use them in this spot. He did an amazing job on this sink and I love it even more than I thought I would.

One of the things I really wanted to do was get rid of our multi-colored tile backsplash. I didn’t love it and the colors were way too bright for the look I wanted to create. We talked about several ways to replace it–but I really wanted to do something that would be affordable and DIY-friendly. Believe it or not, we actually ended up putting the beadboard directly over the tile and it worked amazingly well. I LOVE it. I’m so happy we decided to go that route because it brought a lot of texture and warmth to this space, which works really well with the sleek quartz countertops. I’m going to share a full tutorial on that soon, so stay tuned!

Now to the other side of the kitchen, here’s a before photo of how it looked when we got started back in February:

And how it looks now:

Check out this post to see how we created the passthrough. That was a doozy of a project and took us several months to complete, but it was totally worth it. Definitely one of the best things we could have done in our kitchen.

Living in a fixer upper and slowly updating it over time is an interesting process. I mean, you see in your mind how you want your home to look and then it’s an uphill battle to make it happen. Financially, physically, and even emotionally. I know that probably sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s true. There’s a lot that goes into it, especially when you’re doing it slowly and DIY-ing a lot of things as you go. It’s a process that can get really discouraging at times and it requires a lot of patience and energy. But it’s always worth it in the end and it’s almost like the struggle makes it even sweeter, if that makes any sense. And looking at our little kitchen now, I can’t help but feel emotional about how far we’ve come in our fixer upper. It’s been a heck of a journey and I’m just so grateful to see my vision for our home come to life. Our kitchen may be small, but it has such a cozy, cottage feel now and it fits us perfectly. I am so happy with how it all came together.

Thank you all for following along on our journey over these last two years. I’m so blessed to have this place to share my ideas for our home and all our renovations. You guys are awesome and your support truly means so much!

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